"Using found materials and mesmerizing structures that unearth deep-rooted emotions, Wangechi Mutu's visual creations celebrate our collective history and explore how art communicates into the future. From ancient rock carvings in the Sahel to her own chimeric abstractions, she shares her journey of self-discovery and reminds us all that we already speak the most ancient language of all."

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce the acquisition of Dave McKenzie's "Listed under accessories," 2022 by The Whitney Museum of American Art!

Dave McKenzie's two-channel video, Listed under accessories, was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It's Kept, curated by Adrienne Edwards and David Breslin and was acquired by the museum for the permanent collection.

The New Museum presents "Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined" running from March 2 through June 4, 2023 a major solo exhibition of the work of Wangechi Mutu.

Representing the full breadth of her practice, the presentation will encompass painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, film, and performance. Mutu first gained acclaim for her collage-based practice exploring camouflage, transformation, and mutation. She extends these strategies to her work across various media, developing hybrid, fantastical forms that fuse mythical and folkloric narratives with layered sociohistorical references. “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined” will trace connections between recent developments in the artist’s sculptural practice and her decades-long exploration of the legacies of colonialism, globalization, and African and diasporic cultural traditions. At once culturally specific and transnational in scope, Mutu’s work grapples with contemporary realities, while proffering new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis.

Art Production Fund’s ‘Now Playing’ brings together a series of artworks that shine a light on the often-overlooked elements of everyday life in Los Angeles; the vehicles, street food, sports, aircraft, construction sites and deeper histories that blend into the background. The artists featured in ‘Now Playing’ provide a lens through which we can see these quotidian details anew; ever present but unseen, that make Los Angeles a city both complex and beloved. ‘Now Playing’ receives support from Art of Recovery, an initiative of the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs. Participating artists in ‘Now Playing’ include Autumn Breon, Chris Burden, Jose Dávila, Basil Kincaid, Divya Mehra, Ruben Ochoa, Alake Shilling and Jennifer West.

Ruben Ochoa pays tribute to the street vendor community, connecting his personal narrative to his art making.

At Frieze Los Angeles 2023, Stanya Kahn will create the newest iteration of the R.U.in.ART Commission: an annual initiative that invites a Californian artist to realize a commission in the Ruinart lounge at Frieze Los Angeles.

Kahn’s commission, titled Understory, takes the form of an installation in which elements of the natural world frame paintings and sculptures depicting lone animals in imagined wilds. Drawing on her 2022 exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, Forest for the Trees, the installation references forms of life that dwell between the forest floor and the canopy.

In the latest episode of Art Basel’s ‘Art in Action’ series, we visit Hugo McCloud in his Los Angeles studio. There he takes us through the origin and creation of his artworks using plastic bags as the primary material. In these works, McCloud depicts scenarios – the transportation of goods, construction, landscaping – that are common across the globe to tell the stories of the laborers who often go unnoticed. The pieces presented in the film are part of a series McCloud informally refers to as ‘the burdened man.’ It is an homage to the anonymous men and women whose daily subsistence is an extraordinary act of resilience. ‘The stories of these individuals and the strengths they carry is something to look up to,’ he says.

Bari Ziperstein's installation "Domestic Choices" at The Wende Museum Guardhouse Project opens November 13 and runs through March 2023.

Conceived specifically for Wende Museum’s original East German Guardhouse, Bari Ziperstein’s Domestic Choices (2022) is a set of painted and embroidered curtains encircling the interior of the guardhouse, which is lit from within to generate a warm glow. Rather than face inward, the curtains in Domestic Choices face outward, confusing not only the orientation of inside and outside but also the very purpose of curtains in general and the guardhouse itself, a tiny piece of architecture intended for privacy’s opposite: surveillance.

The curtains in Domestic Choices are inspired by the hundreds of textile patterns Ziperstein has encountered through her extensive research in the Wende Museum archives. Though this research has informed her work in ceramics for many years, this is the first time she has worked in textiles herself. Made in collaboration with artist Jill Spector, the curtains were first block printed with celery hearts and sponges to suggest a petaled flower pattern. Then, using hand cut stencils and spray paint to achieve a misty effect, Ziperstein added abstract shapes. Next, she painted leaf and dot patterns in free hand. The final layer is embroidery depicting Soviet war planes, done by Spector. The pattern synthesizes themes Ziperstein has noticed over and over in her research: benign imagery such as florals and repeated abstract patterns combined with symbols of military might.

True Believers: Benny Andrews & Deborah Roberts provides a historic and contemporary view of the Black experience in America through the work of two artists from different generations. This exhibition explores the deep connections between the work of these two artists in relation to formal similarities, specifically the utilization of collage, as well as their shared interest in themes of activism, racial injustice, family, and religion.

"Stand in the Stream" captures the rise of the internet and social media as tools for political organizing while simultaneously exposing their evolution into powerful sources of surveillance and marketing. Edited with precision and intensity, the film’s footage (all shot by Kahn or screen-recorded by Kahn in real time) moves globally and locally through the wild, the streets, the home, and online, in a visceral, phenomenological reflection of life, power and uprising in late capitalism.

Articulating a powerful personal dynamic to political movements, the narrative arc of the film is shaped by the decline of Kahn’s mother to dementia, and the birth and growth of her son amid the shift of political and digital landscapes over time. An activist and former shipyard worker, Kahn's mother speaks candidly about unions, NAFTA, the dangers of politicians in the pockets of lobbyists, how she wouldn’t want to get dementia like her mother before, even as she deteriorates. Her illness and death are woven with lo-fi clips of Kahn’s home life raising her son, caretaking, repairing, working, always from the POV of a camera. Interspersed and ongoing, is Kahn’s persistent screen recording of live streams on the internet. 

"Stand in the Stream" mimics our screen-saturated perspectives, hinting at questions of accountability, acknowledging our participation in a sometimes voyeuristic and alienated consumption of the world through images. In Kahn’s massive collection of footage—edited with an operatic sense of sound’s power to draw the epic from the mundane—we experience capitalism’s acculturation of our very personhood and the blooms of resistance and resilience.
 
Kahn’s sound design includes original compositions by Kahn and the musician/composer Alexia Riner.

On view September 16 - December 4, 2022

Deborah Roberts critiques notions of beauty, the body, race, and identity in contemporary society through the lens of Black children. Her mixed media works on paper and on canvas combine found images, sourced from the Internet, with hand-painted details in striking figural compositions that invite viewers to look closely, to see through the layers. She focuses her gaze on Black children—historically, and still today, among the most vulnerable members of our population—investigating how societal pressures, projected images of beauty or masculinity, and the violence of American racism conditions their experiences growing up in this country as well as how others perceive them. Simultaneously heroic and insecure, playful and serious, powerful and vulnerable, the figures Roberts depicts are complex, occasionally based on actual living or historical persons.

This program of three works in the Art Institute’s collection represents highlights from McMillian’s work in video. In Untitled (The Great Society) I (2006), he stages a performance in which he recites President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 commencement speech at the University of Michigan. By narrating this speech—in which Johnson outlined his ambitious agenda for social welfare legislation aimed at ending poverty and racial injustice—McMillian raised questions about how history and politics are themselves consistently, and repeatedly, performed. A Migration Tale (2014–15) follows a masked, black-clad character traveling on foot and via subway, a contemporary reference to the Great Migration that millions of African Americans made during the first half of the 20th century. In Preacher Man (2015), McMillian sits calmly on a chair in an empty field and presents philosophical musings by the experimental jazz composer and musician Sun Ra.

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Andrea Bowers on the opening of her solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum on view through September 4, 2022.

For more than 30 years, Andrea Bowers (b. 1965, Wilmington, Ohio) has made art that activates. She combines artistic practice with activism and advocacy, speaking to deeply entrenched inequities as well as the generations of activists working to create a more just world. Bowers has built an international reputation as a chronicler of contemporary history, documenting activism as it unfolds and collecting research on the front lines of protest. Her practice contends with issues such as immigration rights, workers’ rights, climate justice, and women’s rights, illustrating the shared pursuit of justice that connects them.

Andrea Bowers, the first museum retrospective surveying more than two decades of the artist’s production, traces the entire scope and evolution of her work. Bringing together approximately 60 works as well as a trove of ephemera, the exhibition reflects Bowers’s embrace and experimentation with a wide range of mediums, including drawing, performance, installation, sculpture, video, and neon sculptures.

Andrea Bowers is organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The exhibition is co-curated by Michael Darling, formerly the James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Connie Butler, Chief Curator of the Hammer Museum, with Nika Chilewich, curatorial assistant, Hammer Museum.

"The Storm King exhibition will feature bronze sculptures installed in the indoor and outdoor spaces of the centre that will aim to emphasise Mutu’s interest in the natural world, something that has “been present but not at the forefront of conversations around her work”, according to Nora Lawrence, the centre’s artistic director and chief curator.

“Mutu’s work is rooted in the idea of karmic power, or a future where humans have reconnected with the environment, where human and non-human elements merge and create a greater force because of their union,” Lawrence tells The Art Newspaper. “The landscape at Storm King is an ideal platform for understanding this facet of her work.”

The commission includes a monumental fountain spanning 15 ft. in length that will flank an area known as “museum hill”, a focal point of the sculpture park that offers panoramic views of the grounds and houses another iconic sculptural fountain, the work North South East West (1988/2009/2014-15) by Lynda Benglis. Mutu’s work will take the form of a water-filled canoe holding anthropomorphic female figures that are intertwined with tendrilous roots resembling mangroves."

By Gabriella Angeleti - 15 March 2022

“Deborah Roberts: I’m,” features the artist’s mixed-media works and will be on view at Art + Practice from March 19 through August 20, 2022. In tandem, the artist’s figurative mural “Little man, little man,” 2020, will be installed on the walls in the California African American Museum's expansive lobby, encouraging viewers to travel between the two sites.

Deborah Roberts and Genevieve Gaignard are featured in "Assembly: New Acquisitions by Contemporary Black Artists" at the Blanton Museum of Art on view through May 8, 2022.

"Assembly includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, textiles, and a monumental print, all produced between 1980 and 2019. Although diverse in style and subject matter, many of the works have ties to Southern history and reveal what scholar Saidiya Hartman refers to as “the long afterlife of slavery.” For example, the shared surname of two—unrelated—quiltmakers in the exhibition, Arie Pettway and Sally Mae Pettway Mixon, is that of the plantation owner their enslaved ancestors were forced to serve in Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Kevin Beasley’s resin sculpture incorporates raw cotton from his family’s farm in Virginia. Nari Ward’s immersive installation honors overlooked places, people, and traditions in Savannah, Georgia. Cauleen Smith made her recent neon work in memory of Sandra Bland, a Black woman who died in police custody after a routine traffic stop in Waller County, Texas.

The title of the presentation, Assembly, embraces the heterogeneity of work made by Black artists, refusing generalization, essentialization, and definitive interpretation. As theorized by the late British cultural critic Stuart Hall and expanded on by American philosopher Paul C. Taylor, with “assembly” comes the potential for disassembly and reassembly. In this gathering, we encounter acts of representation, resilience, reclamation, and resistance."

"The National Gallery of Art has acquired Sarah Cain’s Self-Portrait (2020), an exuberant, mixed-media abstract painting. The non-representational self-portrait is the first work by this original artist to enter the National Gallery’s collection.

Self-Portrait features a dynamic whorl of hard-edged colored bands creating curvilinear forms that alternate between foreground—for example, the large black band with drips that descend throughout the lower register—and background, as illustrated by the black translucent ground of smaller organic shapes. Cain incorporates an abstract vocabulary of form, color, and materials in this painting to create speculation about this painting’s meaning as a self-portrait. She sewed prismatic beads, given to her by her mother, into the center of the canvas as a kind of supportive, light-filled spine—an example of the personal symbolism in this work. Cain’s Self-Portrait painting brings the tradition of abstract painting into the present and continues a rich dialog with countless works in the National Gallery’s collection, including abstract works by artists Lynda Benglis, Ellsworth Kelly, Joan Mitchell, Amy Sillman, Joan Snyder, Frank Stella, and Richard Tuttle."

Curated by Sylvie Fortin, I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality invites visitors to consider how hospitality has simultaneously circumscribed what we think bodies are, what we imagine they can do, how we feel they relate, whom we believe they can encounter, and ultimately, how they engage with each other and in the world. The exhibition explores these questions in space by weaving together open-ended experiential connections between works in a range of media, from painting, sculpture, textile, installation and performance to lens- and time-based practices. These works explore several questions, including pregnancy and surrogacy; transplantation, implantation and transfusion; neural adaptation and the phantom limb; bacteria and the microbiome; viruses, parasites, symbionts and holobionts; stem cells; mechanical and chemical prosthetics; architectures and protocols of corporeal hospitality; dreams and dreamwork; and the “miraculous” work of relics, spirits and energies. In the process, the exhibition reveals a storied genealogy that points to the extractive intersection of race, gender, class, religion and value. I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality critically excavates this legacy and offers up an expanded theater of operations.

The exhibition includes works by Ingrid Bachmann, Crystal Z Campbell, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Stephanie Dinkins, Celina Eceiza, Adham Faramawy, Mounir Fatmi, Flis Holland, Oliver Husain, Rodney McMillian, Bridget Moser, Pedro Neves Marques, Berenice Olmedo, Kerstin Schroedinger, Jenna Sutela, Ana Torfs, and Francis Upritchard.

December 9, 2021 - March 19, 2022
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts

The exhibition features Watson's body of work tackling everyday scenes of the artist's life during the pandemic. Curated by Indra Lācis, Director of Exhibitions.⁠
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"Both individually and as a cohesive timeline, the artist’s Pandemic Paintings invoke active forms of reflection and remembrance, as well as a sense of mutually shared vulnerability and participation in understanding the surreal and significant events of 2020."

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley are celebrated for video works featuring a distinctively graphic black-and-white palette and scripted narratives in rhyming verse full of punning wordplay by characters brought to life onscreen by Mary. Centered around two new film works—Blood Moon and I’m Jackson Pollock—the exhibition explores the mechanics of power and its fallibility, each film presented in an immersive world and experienced through a darkly funny lens. Co-curated by Alec Unkovic, Exhibitions Manager, and Karen Patterson, Curator and Director of Exhibitions.⁠

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Pope.L on the opening of Misconceptions, his first solo video exhibition in Germany at Portikus in Frankfurt. The exhibition features a new video work titled Missverständnisse. It consists of several episodes produced in the format of a TV quiz show and filmed at Portikus and other places around Frankurt's city center. The exhibition is curated by Christina Lehnert.

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing away of artist and friend, Louise Fishman, at the age of 82. Our heartfelt condolences go out to her partner, Ingrid Nyeboe, her family, and her close community of friends, artists, poets, musicians, and spiritual practitioners.

Born in Philadelphia in 1939, Louise Fishman forged a unique and prolific career — five decades of consistently manifesting the energy and vision required to create a more aesthetically generous world. In lineage with such painters as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell as well as finding influence through friendships with artists Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse, Fishman developed an articulate and athletic approach to painterly abstraction merging the hard-edge objectivity of the grid and the gestural subjectivity of expressionism, all the while developing a language for art-making rooted in her identities as Jewish, feminist, and lesbian. 

Working with Louise was an absolute honor; her distinguished career, her feminism, her activism, and her oeuvre of dynamic paintings are a combined act of fortitude and grace. 

A retrospective of works on paper, A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing will be on view August 2021 — February 25, 2022, at the Krannert Art Museum, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Curated by Amy Powell, A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing will be the first career-spanning exhibition and publication of Fishman’s works on paper, including more than 100 works from the artist’s archive that have rarely been exhibited alongside significant institutional and private loans.